Jacqueline Wilson: ‘I wanted to show even for women whose marriage breaks up in middle age that, actually, it’s not over’

The social media accounts of millennial women partial to a heady dose of nostalgia were abuzz in March with the news that beloved children’s author Jacqueline Wilson was set to release her first novel for adults. Wilson, speaking via a widely circulated video, told fans her new book, Think Again, would revisit the trio of friends from the Girls in Love series, first published in 1997, as its protagonist, Ellie, turns 40 in real time.
News of the novel’s release prompted me to go rifling through the cupboard over the wardrobe in my childhood bedroom for a postcard I received from Wilson in response to a letter I wrote to her in 2007. Speaking in advance of Think Again’s September release, Wilson says she always tries to respond to the letters that grab her attention, or to young people who seem sad or worried.
“I have still got a few people that wrote to me when they were children and I still write to them now. I’m kind of like a token auntie or something, or a great-auntie, I suppose, now,” she says.
The image of Wilson on the postcard, adorned with chunky silver rings and bangles, will be familiar to many of those who read her books as children, and as any fan who has received a letter from her or heard her speak knows, she plays the “auntie” role with generosity and warmth.
The comments under the author’s social media announcement were flooded with a collective joy from women fans excited to once again be able to relate to Wilson’s characters.
“I think at the moment, possibly because of all the troubles in the world and the pandemic and everything, people have a real taste for nostalgia and looking backwards, which, who knows whether it’s healthy or not, but it’s a fact and I wanted to reflect that too,” says Wilson.
The idea to imagine the lives of her characters beyond their teenage years has come up several times, Wilson says, in chats with her daughter, in a conversation with one of the actors in the BBC TV adaptation of Girls in Love, and even from a fan’s speculative Twitter thread, which received a flurry of “amazingly outrageous ideas” in response, Wilson says.
It was not until one of her editors approached her that Wilson felt she had permission to pursue it. “I practically bit their hands off – yes please! – and I’ve found it the most interesting and delightful experience,” she says.
“I did wonder what it was going to be like,” Wilson says of writing for adult readers, “and yet somehow the characters took over and there was slightly more freedom because you could deal with quite dark subjects.”
In Think Again, we are reintroduced to Ellie on the cusp of her 40th birthday, single, with a daughter going to college.
“Although I wanted Ellie to have some success as the cartoonist for the Guardian, which I think was a big accolade for her, I didn’t want her to be leading a great swishy London life with lots of arty friends and to be very successful because I think the reason Ellie was so popular in the first book was because she was ‘every girl’,” says Wilson.
“She wasn’t quite as pretty as her friends; she wasn’t quite as confident. And I think inside every young woman there’s a sort of Ellie that wonders about things and gets upset and just in a state about things. And so, I wanted her still to be like that,” she says.
In her response to my teenage fan letter, Wilson wrote that she “so totally agreed” with me that it was a shame the Ellie was portrayed by “such a slim” actor in the TV adaptation – “though [the actor] is very gifted”, she added. As readers of the series will know, Ellie, who is 13 in the first book, struggles with her perception of herself as overweight and less attractive than her best friends.
“I never really interfere with any sort of television production because I understand it’s an entirely different medium and they’ll go their own way anyway,” Wilson says now. However, she makes a point to say, she did in fact ask that the actors be real teenagers rather than women in their 20s, and that Ellie would not be depicted as very slim. “And of course we got a beautiful actress who was so attractive and, I mean, not an ounce overweight and I just thought, well, why do that?” she says.
In Think Again, adult Ellie still spends a lot of time worrying about her perceived physical imperfection. I found it hard to believe a successful woman turning 40 would not have more important things on her mind, and that she hadn’t gained at least a little self-confidence along the way.
“My lovely and painstaking editor did take slight issue with this, saying, look, [Ellie] is 40 now and would she still be as insecure, and we’re not into thinking that it matters what we look like and everything. And I understand that, entirely,” says Wilson.
“[But] I still think some people, including me, I don’t just automatically go out without glancing in the mirror, though it’s quite a painful process when you get as old as me, I do care about the way I look and if that makes me shallow, I can’t help it,” she says.
“I like to get into all those secret thoughts that people sometimes have.”
Another preoccupation of Ellie’s that persists into adulthood is art. She has built a career as a successful cartoonist – a private joke for the writer, Wilson says, as Ellie was always given out to for drawing little cartoons in her art classes at school.
That scolding often came from her former much-revered art teacher, Mr Wilson, who, to her friends Nadine and Magda’s delight, becomes a love interest for Ellie in Think Again.
“I thought it was an interesting thing because they’re two single adults, there’s absolutely no reason why they can’t get together, but there’s still something odd about that situation,” says Wilson.
“She did look up to him tremendously when she was young, because he had all the knowledge and she didn’t, but it’s highly irritating for her now and he still seems to take the role of being her teacher and telling her things that she already knows. And I think so many women have experienced this when some male, with the sweetest of intentions, is incredibly annoying, telling you things you already know or things you don’t even want to know, and so I thought I’d have fun with that too,” she says.
Wilson also explores how dynamics in close friendships inevitably change as you get older, though the bond remains.
“If you’ve known somebody for so long, even though they are mature women now, you can still look at them and you can see what they were like when they were younger. And it’s still possible, if you go telling anecdotes from the past, suddenly everybody will burst out laughing about something that isn’t really funny, but it was when it happened to you when you were at that silly, giggly stage and it’s a lovely nostalgic thing,” she says.
In Think Again, we learn that Ellie became a single mother at 19, and her daughter, Lottie, is now starting university.
“Sometimes mother-daughter relationships are odd in books nowadays and they’re at each other’s throats and certainly, I must admit, I didn’t get on with my mother in the slightest,” says Wilson.
“But my own daughter, though she’s nothing like Lottie and I didn’t have her when I was 19 and single, but we are really quite close and I wanted to show how positive it is and how lovely it is to have a daughter,” she says.
Perhaps the most transformative relationship for Ellie in Think Again is with her new friend Alice, who offers a source of light and hope throughout the book. Her relationship with Alice grows into a romantic one and is a catalyst for Ellie to discover her true self.
“I think nowadays we’re starting to embrace the idea that sexuality can be a bit fluid and you might have a really meaningful relationship or six with one sort of person, and then suddenly get really attracted to another,” says Wilson.
“I wanted to show that 40 isn’t a sort of downward slope, as I think I myself did at 40, and thought, well, life is good now but it’s never really going to change very much. And then all sorts of changes happened. Not so much in my 40s, [but] in my 50s.
“Then I wanted to show that even for women whose marriage breaks up when they are middle-aged – as, sadly, a lot of conventional marriages do seem to do – actually, it’s not over. It might be the new beginning.”
Think Again by Jacqueline Wilson is published by Bantam. Jacqueline Wilson will be live in conversation with Aoife Barry on Thursday, September 26th, at DLR Library, Dún Laoghaire